How to eat an Internet troll

Here’s something you surely already suspected but which is nevertheless sort of nice to have validated by science:

Internet trolls? Those nasty, scabrous, hate-spitting folk who spend their sunlight-deprived days taunting, baiting and venomizing all over the Interweb’s anonymous comments sections in response to, well, just about about any article, column, video, photo gallery, product review or heartfelt tale of love and woe from the here to Gawker to Amazon, Car & Driver to Knitter’s World to the NYT, including but certainly not limited to the very Slate article which discusses the general cruelty and stupidity of trolls itself?

Turns out they really are awful people. Sociopathic, sadistic, narcissistic, cruel by nature, highly unpleasant to be around. They love to cause pain. They delight in ruining the beautiful. The more pure and integrity-filled something is, the more they enjoy corrupting it. So says a new psychology study. Also, they’re antisocial. Poor dressers. Ungainly. Hairy in all the wrong places. Smell like soggy asparagus and old toenails. I’m just guessing.

Did you already suspect as much? Of course you did. It takes exactly 28 seconds of reading the comments beneath, say, any Gawker article ever posted to feel deeply soiled and sad for the state of modern humanity, and for the under-30 Millennial set in particular. And trolling’s even more vicious alter-ego, Internet bullying, has resulted in far uglier consequences, like depression and suicide. Trolling and vicious, look-at-me commenting in general has, to many, reached epidemic proportions, and some major news sites are shutting off comments entirely to try and tamp down the bile.

(Amusingly enough, the very Slate article that discusses the troll study is rife, nay rife with all sorts of snarky feedback, nasty comments and demeaning trollspeak both casual and foul, thus verifying another quality you already suspected about trolls: their complete lack of a sense of irony).

But the personality of trolls wasn’t really the question, was it? The real question is: whence do these warped beings come? Does the Internet spawn these toxic personalities, or merely exacerbate their puerile nature, give it outlet and volume? Which came first: the sadist, or the anonymous forum into which the sadist is born?

Here’s a pleasant fact: Just like in real life, the nasty, small-minded people who get off on trolling make up a very small fraction of Internet commenters as a whole, and an even smaller fraction of Internet users overall (more than 41 percent of Internet users never post in the comments sections in the first place).

Then again, it’s my experience that countless are the commenters who probably don’t consider themselves true trolls at all, who think they’re merely engaging in snarky and “clever” bantering as they casually rip apart the subject of a given article (like this one), or the writer, or the host site, or the weather, or each other, everyone apparently so bored out of their minds that engaging in a flame war about, say, stemware brands, or dog breeds, or Google buses, or which Bluetooth headphones are best is cause for endless, low-level viciousness and disgust disguised as “discussion.”

Ah, but causality is elusive, is it not? There’s simply no way know if the Net has made the culture of hatred exponentially worse, or uglier, or of any different a nice/mean ratio than your average slightly obnoxious cocktail party. There’s no way to measure today’s cruel jerk quotient against that of even 20 years ago. It sure seems like there’s more odium in the world, but that’s probably just a factor of the Net’s megaphone effect.

What we can measure a bit more accurately, is the positive flipside. Because here’s the good news: While the Net is an irresistible playground for sadists much in the way a public garden is an irresistible place for thugs to stomp on the flowers, the Internet also enables and encourages millions of already nice, already thoughtful, already reasonably happy people to get, well, even nicer.

Do you notice? Do you notice enough? Countless are the wondrous tales of support, love, rallying cry, outpouring of grief and adoration, sympathy and financial help in response to all sorts of need, from disaster relief to upstart project.

Entire Internet-enabled industries have been emerged as a result of this timeless humanistic urge: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, RocketHub and all the other crowdfunding success stories, for example, are born of this innate to help out, to discover causes, products and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise. According to Forbes, the U.S. leads the world in crowdfunding, estimated to have hit around $5 billion in 2013. The Guardian reports that visitors to Kickstarter alone pledged upwards of $480 million to various projects in 2013, up from $319 million in 2012. That’s a lot of anti-troll positivism.

It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? The number of people who are cheering someone on, helping a friend’s business, participating in an online charity or sending a blast of blessing, kindness, or love far outnumber – not to mention wildly outclass – the trolls. Forget it at your peril.

It’s like junk food. It’s like reality TV. It’s like like old media, in which the loudest, most bilious talking heads still get the most airtime. It’s like politics, where the hysterical wails and alarmist stunts of the Ted Cruz’s and Rand Pauls of the world will always grab the headlines. It takes a bit of effort to remember that intelligence and integrity still outweigh the trashy and the dumb. Mostly. Sometimes. You hope.

For the record and for what it’s worth, I never read the anonymous comments below my own columns, never have and never will. The toxicity level is far too high, and any honest discussion-making by intelligent or otherwise articulate parties is shouted down and poisoned by various insta-haters and right-wing trolls. They deserve exactly zero of my energy or time. I’m usually good for maybe 90 seconds of skimming comments on other news sites I frequent before I read something that makes my heart recoil (exception: the smart, lightly moderated conversations over at Metafilter, which rarely devolve into nastiness or outright trolling, and which are often tremendously informative and engaging).

But I don’t feel so bad about shunning the trolls entirely, never responding, never engaging them in the slightest. After all, if sadists and hate-mongers don’t have an audience, if their targets offer only pity them and know them to be just a sad, lonely, ragtag army of sociopathic narcissists, they will have nothing left to feed on, and will resort to the only action left: they will merely eat themselves alive.